Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney’s abstract paintings and works on paper focus on the possibilities of color and form. He arranges his highly saturated color fields into gridded blocks separated by energetic, gestural lines. Whitney draws on disparate influences ranging from the compositions of Titian and Velázquez to Minimalism, Color Field painting, Southern quilts, and the freewheeling jazz of Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman; Whitney describes his loose style as musical and improvisational. The artist received his MFA from Yale and has exhibited in New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, and Shanghai. His work belongs in the collections of the Long Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Palazzo Magnani, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. While Whitney’s work is informed by his identity as a Black American, he’s less interested in explicitly focusing on race and identity than in honing a unique, abstract visual language of his own.